


Arcturus

by grayglube



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Future Fic, Grief, Post Long Night, The North remembers, mentions of past rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 10:57:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7434107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is a woman of twenty years and the only summer she remembers has only just started. She says, “I don’t know what there is to do without an enemy to kill, what are we to do?”</p><p>And she thinks, ‘Here I stand, Winter is over.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arcturus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LolaBleu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LolaBleu/gifts).



> Bear Island is huge, on the map it’s as big as the Wall so it would probably take longer than a day and a half to get from one end to the other but just suspend your disbelief.
> 
> Figure Jon is something like eight to eleven years older than Lyanna, I personally picture closer to eleven.
> 
> Rickon mentioned in this is book Rickon who has been in Skagos and isn’t dead yet in bookverse.
> 
> Lyanna is the youngest of four sisters, who are (oldest to youngest): Dacey, Alysane, Lyra, Jorelle (Jory).

She is nine and ten and he has come again to Bear Island, alone. The small folk still call him King but the time for needing one has passed. There is a Stark in Winterfell and Jon Snow wanders outside of its walls. He looks more at ease than the last she saw him, but perhaps they all are more at ease.

 

He is always a solitary rider and his wolf always heralds his coming.

 

She’s waiting at the shingle beach where its master will cross. The ice has melted and the water is starting to lower in the new warmth. Bear Island is no true island while the ayre shows and allows for riders to cross. The storm season will come and the water will rise and she knows it will be a bad season for ships.

 

Her mount is skittish next to his wolf, but she holds its reins tight. Jon Snow comes, he looks gaunt under his unkempt beard. “You found Ghost.”

 

“He brought down a stag, I had it prepared,”

 

His mouth parts and she adds before he can offer thanks, “three days ago, you must be getting old riding so slow.”

 

His brows raise and she doubts anyone, little folk or lord speaks to him in such a manner. But, he’s been a bastard for near six years and she is the Lady of Bear Island as she has always been.

 

Jon Snow may find home at any hearth in the North for his deeds but she’s not of the same minds that think him a hero in a song. He’s a man. He can be a legend of the North when he’s dead. “You’re the one who didn’t want to be a King anymore, Jon Snow. You’re old and slow and your wolf ate your portion, the old woman at the croft might die before we reach her if you continue to dither.”

 

“If I was King you still would have said that.”

 

“I would have added ‘your grace’ after.”

 

She rides her mount hard, to get back to land before the spit is covered by the tide, he keeps pace. His black cloak is frayed and faded from the silver sun that always shines now, a metal coin in the sky like the Braavosi cache she found in a wreck set free by  the ice in the bay to run aground in the shoal that saved them all from starving in the Winter.

 

It'd been Stannis' ship but Stannis was dead and she does not believe one can steal from the dead, only do them dishonor.

 

It's a secret he's kept for her, then took for her. She does not know what he paid back to the Iron Bank but she can assume. His name remains Jon Snow. Perhaps that was enough.

 

His furs are matted, he’s been wandering for a long stretch.

 

The Keep sits a day away and she asks why he never arrives by boat on the proper side of the island, she’d be able to see him from the headland. He ignores her words as if he hasn't heard them. They lodge in a croft that’s stood since House Woodfoot held the island. The same old woman sits inside that she's seen the last two times he's come to the island. The old woman's sons and grandsons fish while the sea is calm, her sons’ wives sit with the smallest children on their laps and the bigger ones at their feet. All three of the croft-wives are weathered like crags of old stones jutting up from cold water.

 

“Lady Lyanna you have strong arms like your mother.” The old woman says, the same as the last two times.

 

Jon Snow sleeps under the sky with his wolf after he eats the raw turnips and drinks the last of their mead, the women with their children scowl through the clouded glass of the windows, his wolf paces outside under the half-moon.

 

The croft is large but she leaves the bed for the mothers and their babes and leaves the hearth to the old woman rocking in her chair.

 

She wonders if the white raven has come while she has been away from the Keep.

 

“Why do we always stop here?” He asks when she comes close to where she'd thought him asleep.

 

Her grin tells him what he must already know, that she finds it amusing how much the women dislike him and his wolf. She tells him the stories of the stars, points to him the Wain which the sailors use to find their way home because it only ever bathes in the water, never sinks. The old woman comes with her lantern and Lyanna feels small in the largeness of her shadow, the wolf opens its eyes and then pushes his snout into his paws, tired and uninterested.

 

“You," she waves the lantern towards the man some still call King, all their shadows dance, "put your sword between yourself and Lady Lyanna." The old woman waits, adds. "Lord Snow.” She says Lord like one says bastard and she says Snow like a curse. The old woman waits until he does and Lyanna sniggers with her mouth pressed to her knees and then near howls when the woman is gone.

 

“She thinks highly of my honor.” The naked sword shines. And she cannot decide if his words are in jest. “Does she?”

 

“What’s the sword supposed to stop me from doing?”

 

He wasn't jesting she decides, an honest question. His tone never changes, it's why he makes so many skittish, like his wolf. “Longclaw was my grandfather's, once. And that old witch thinks it’s the same as if he was set to sleep between us.”

 

Jon Snow roars so loudly with laughter that a child wakes and answers with a cry from inside the croft.

 

They leave before dawn, she wakes to one of his too serious and far away stares, like he’s filled with stones and ice instead of lifeblood and a soul, his wolf has taken his place and she peers through the fur towards where the sky is bruising before the sun stains it red.

 

There's a bloody pile of rabbit and mole on the stone walk before the croft's door. Horrific but still cause to be grateful, fresh meat to last for two moons.

 

He readies the horses while she makes water. They ride until they reach the Keep.

 

* * *

 

 

He makes note of the palisades. She answers his unspoken question, “The snows melting raised the water and storm season is coming.” He looks at the pile of stones she’s had dragged from the shores during the low tides, twice a day. Men scrub the slimy green moss from them and wash away the scent of fish with lye and fresh water. Again she answers what he does not ask: “There’s a settlement of Pyke whoresons on the frozen shore where there used to be wildings, they come with pitch and try to burn the Keep every moon’s, so I decided to rebuild with stone.”

 

“It will be bigger than Winterfell before Summer ends.”

 

The groom waters their horses and his beast comes up without losing a moment to press its forepaws his master’s shoulders, it stands as big as a man on its hind legs and Jon Snow does not budge under its pressing weight. “You ate my supper, a whole deer.” He says to it. The beast drops down and looks away from him.

 

Jon Snow limps a little, still, he been in the saddle for a long day, old wounds still ache, her own calf throbs.

 

“Do you need a maester?”

 

His scars pull his grin down on one side, “Does it look like I’ve been fighting?” She takes in the leanness of his face, “Starving, actually.”

 

“Both.”

 

They walk the yard.

 

“I expected you’d be a better hunter.” He is too thin she decides.

 

“My bow broke.” He admits.

 

“It got warm too fast.” She agrees, the evidence of it is everywhere. Wood swelling, women swelling, animals howling, babes surviving through the night, raiders raiding.

Something makes him stop his long legged lope to the keep, she turns to look. “You have found pets my Lady.” she stops, “Ah, those dumb things,” the pair of animals make sounds as they chew, “tried to cross the ice while it was melting. Got stuck and drifted here. Jory’s son got himself bit for pulling at the big one’s bollocks.”

 

The reindeer pair pause and stare then continue to chew and ignore them from their enclosure. “Alysane calls them Jorah and Lynesse after our uncle and his wife.” 

 

Jon Snow walks to the stick and string fence, she follows after his wolf. She wraps her hands around a greenstick branch, “Before we had this built the doe would go out and we’d see her with bucks, an elk once and the male just kept bringing her things to eat.”

 

“How keen of your sister, she has a great wit.”

 

She sucks her teeth, scowls in seriousness “Yes, she’s a sharp mind.” Jon Snow laughs.

 

It's strange how often it happens now, he's happy she decides. It's an omen belaying the certainty of Spring, a happy Stark.

 

* * *

 

 

They sup by the great hearth in an empty hall drinking ale and dipping bread into what’s left of the stewed lamb. He talks more than he used to when he was King and broods less. She pulls her boot to the edge of her chair and rests her arm there. She’ll be to bed soon, the ale is getting stronger now that they have the means to make more. His voice slips through her thought as he speaks what she's been thinking as of late, “It's a strange time now. Summer.”

 

She proclaims too loudly in the empty hall, “It was a strange time, then." Then her own voice echoes back, and she softens, "You were not meant to be King, I was not meant to sit in this seat.” She presses her palm to the smooth wood of her mother’s chair. He’s drank more than her but he’s barely in his cups. He has a dead man’s eyes when he looks askance at her and asks, “Why did she leave you here?”

 

“My mother?”

 

He nods.

 

“You mean why didn’t she leave one of my sisters.” She corrects.

 

She barely remembers her mother. He shrugs, not quite as stiffly as he’s been wont to do before, “If you like.”

 

“Alysane was fighting Ironborn, so she wasn’t going to leave _her_ daughter here alone and her son was still at teat. Jory and Lyra were with my mother, they could fight by then.” She puts down her ale, “If the keep or the island was taken or if I’d been killed, made hostage, it wouldn’t have hurt my mother as much as if it was one of my sisters. Because I was the youngest.”

 

Jon Snow says nothing. She wonders why he nods as if he knows, understands, then she recalls, half-drunk that he went away to the Wall by choice. He drinks and she does the same. The fire will go down soon, she looks into it, “I was never angry about that, she left for war when all I could do was shit and eat and cry. Dacey was killed at the twins and my mother lost her heir, she had the rest of us but Dacey had killed men  in battle, she was learned and born for this seat. All that work, all that she was, a perfect heir _gone_.”

 

He’s already finished the lamb but she presses her bread to the puddling left in the bowl, speaks while chewing and waving away the sad and awful past for the disappointing present, “Alysane likes her boats and has no mind for this, her daughter is fat with a third babe, her son wasn’t born right but I think he's happy enough.”

 

The last log crumbles into bright, glowing pieces and she swallows the last of the bread, it does nothing to stem the influence of the ale. “My mother died coming home from Greywater, Lyra died on the way there, Jory stayed with her frog boy."

 

Quietly he speaks, interrupts, in his always hoarse voice, “Unlikely as you are I can’t imagine anyone else serving Bear Island better.”

 

“Jon Snow?”

           

“Yes?”

 

She drains her ale and rises, sways and holds the back of his chair. She leans close and he doesn’t even blink when she swallows to find the words, “You need to bathe, you stink.”

           

His eyes shut and then he laughs, nods, “My lady.”

 

She snorts. Then inclines her head, lowers her eyes, tone low and serious, “Your grace.” He laughs louder and pushes at her as she straightens, like a man to a friend, a soldier to a comrade. The ale makes her look at him, a man, too gaunt still but that will change if he stays and eats and fights and fucks while he's her guest. She leaves before she bloodies his plump lip with her teeth.

 

Her chambers are warm but she sleeps in her clothes until she wakes with an aching head and a sour mouth to the horn blowing. Reavers have come in the small hours before dawn, one ship, a score and handful of men. She rises and wonders if they will ever grow tired of having their ships burnt or stolen by a little girl.

 

She curses as she stumbles back into her boots.

 

Jon Snow waits for her with his beast.

 

* * *

 

 

She is ten and five when she truly fights for the North, among men who are not sworn to her house but to the Starks and to Jon Snow. She fights for Torrhen’s Square. Alysane’s ship is swift and removes the Ironborn’s only hope of escape by sea.

 

She is ten and five when she truly fights for the North and brought to the ground by a blow to the head, an overeager swing of a club, not even an enemy, just carelessness of someone whose arm is too long, when she opens her swollen eyes it’s to a grey sky and an Ironborn with stained teeth.

 

She is ten and five when she truly fights for the North and comes to know the greatest shame warriors and women face; capture.

 

They slit the throat of the hobbled man lying amongst the dead not far from her, she forces herself to her feet without words and follows, it is a frail hope she nurses. She’s learned to wrestle and having been youngest and smallest she knows the pain of losing, the way it bruises and the way it aches after, but when the Ironborn beat her it is brutal and she wonders how her bones do not break, one eye swells tight enough to make her half blind.

 

Captives are stripped of their weapons and armor and then it is her breasts that have only just started to round like her sisters' that take the attention of the one who has taken her knife and helmet. She’s shorn like a boy but she knows what comes. She’s _known_ what could happen. It is not the chill of dread that lodges in her gut but the burn of indignation and rage that lodges in her throat. The beatings might have been more brutal than she might have imagined, but there are only two rapes.

 

The Ironborn that has taken her helmet and knife pulls down her collar and his grin almost split his face in two until another strikes him with the back of their hand as one would a woman, “That doesn’t belong to you.” A man says, young and slender and with the eyes of an old cat when the men start to howl and hands reach out to tear her from her tunic. The young one has noticed how the two Mormont men who have recognized the sharp hungry curves of her face and her badly shorn hair have started to struggle against their bonds, how even when they are beaten more severely they do not cease their struggle.

 

They have given away her worth. One dies then, the other on the field later after they’ve been liberated.

 

Years later she still gifts the mother of one and the wife of another tribute in gold, she tells the women left behind that their men saved her life. They did, despite what followed.

 

The young grinning one shouts, “First patrol and then you can all amuse yourselves until morning.” Then he brings her to his captain.

 

His captain tells her he will make her squeal and take her as salt wife.

 

She does not speak, she barely makes a sound, she does not know how many more beatings she can survive but the rape at least is quick and easier to endure than boots and mailed fists.

 

Once he's spilled seed he questions, “What house are you from? My man said Mormont but you don’t look anything like a she-bear. You’re like a lost cub.” She glares. She can almost taste the blood that would fill her mouth if she bit off his ear. She says nothing. He takes her silence and mocks her as angry. When he has her again it takes much longer  for him to spill and she only sneers when he dresses quickly after, telling her he doesn’t think he’s ever been put into a worse mood after bedding a prize.

 

He leaves her and then the smiling boy has returned, she is told to dress and is brought below to the cells. “If he gives you to me I’m going to slice off your teats.”

 

She spits blood onto the floor and his boots, he shoves her into the cell.

 

It is House Glover’s men that come to take back the stronghold, they have always been good at recapturing forts from the Ironborn. So much so that she wonders how they manage to lose them in the first place. They give her an axe and she follows to the field. Her aches are forgotten when a man’s face collapses like a summer gourd under her steel.

 

She sees Jon Snow and she then the bows being drawn behind him and she drops her axe to run, they will not survive without him, she thinks, as if the dead are still coming and have not all been burned. The pain makes her see only white and she wonders if it has made her blind, the arrow has only cut open the meat of her face, like the ripe flesh of summer fruit. There is one pointing from her breast, moving as she does, and another in her leg.

 

Her knees strike the ground but she does not lie in the mud, Jon Snow calls for a horse and his wildling with lucky hair pulls her across the saddle and when she wakes she is in Winterfell.

  

* * *

 

 

In her ninth year they tell her that Dacey has died, and she does not yet know that she will never meet her mother in a way she will remember when she is grown. Alysane stays long enough to send her sisters with a force to meet their mother.

 

It is the last time she sees Lyra, and it will be seven more years before she’ll meet Jory and the babe she bore a boy who lives in a swamp and eats lizards. He has a noble house but his hair and teeth are sure to be green.

 

In her ninth year she is named the Lady of Bear Island, she cries when Alysane sails away to keep the Ironborn from landing on their shores, she thinks she will surely die, that men will come to kill her as sure as they killed Dacey, as surely as they will soon kill her mother with grief and another sister by violence.

 

When Alysane returns and leaves again she does not cry and when Stannis Baratheon sends a raven telling her that he is King she is only angry.

 

Her sisters have died for a King in the North, a Stark. Alysane fights the Ironborn because the Starks gave them that task. She only knows one King. There is no reply to her rebuttal.

 

When she is ten Jon Snow comes to Bear Island to beg for men with his pretty sister who has suffered more than most and been mocked for it. A man named Ser over onions sets fear in her over dead men that turns out to not be a child's tale.

 

* * *

 

 

At ten and five she is always cross, always short, and not often wrong. She tells the maester to stop fretting over tea as if she's the first woman to suffer indignities, “My besmirched honor won’t be what kills me, take out this arrow.”

 

A maid of Lady Sansa's with some work in healing speaks, “It will scar already and if we pull it out it’s going to bleed.”

 

“Close it with fire and be done then!”

 

The maester starts but the red wilding who has been at Jon Snow's side from the start twists and digs out the arrows in her, the pain makes her mute and the loss of blood and almost life make her open arms to the warmth of the dark.

 

She wakes to sip at the bowl brought, it isn’t what she would call tea, it is leaves and water and she wonders if it’s truly meant to be warmed.

 

“Twice today, twice tomorrow and if the moon doesn’t bring blood then twice again.” The maester says, practiced at the words. She swallows and she is given milk of the poppy next and then she sleeps until she is woken to take more tea, then after with nothing left to do but heal she sleeps for four full days.

 

When she wakes he is waiting. Jon Snow has been wounded in the days she’d been asleep, nothing killing but something that will scar.

 

He says, “You saved my life.”

 

She nods with a heavy head, “Aye.”

 

“Anything I can give, you have.”

 

He’s still too earnest she thinks.

 

“Did we take captives?”

 

“A score.”

           

“Their captain?”

 

He looks at her then, there’s the ringed strand of islands, bruises from teeth curling under the wrapping around her wounded breast. He’d been there to see the blood on her smallclothes and the shadows of hands left on her throat and arms. “Dead.”

 

She does not think he pities her, only understands. She wonders who killed him.

 

“Can I have his ship?”

 

“I’ll have it sailed to dock at Bear Island.”

           

She almost says 'thank you,' and 'your grace', instead she nods, "I’m going back to sleep now, you can call the maester back.”

 

* * *

 

 

She is ten and three and Jon the White Wolf, Bran the Warg, Sansa Redstark and Rickon the Reaver hold the North against the dead.

 

In Winterfell there are men who see her dressed in mail made for her, with a helmet that she’s only just grown into and raise brows, others laugh, one asks loudly, “Has she even bled yet?” And another already into his cups chokes on ale, “I could give her first blood.”

 

Mormont men go still, like ice has flooded them, they will break the skulls of those who mock her if she waved a hand, she bangs her tankard, “I haven’t bled yet but I’ve killed men bigger than you and if you try to fuck me I'll bite off your cock with the teeth I have down there.”

 

Her men howl. So do others, she hears no more jests. The wilding who will one day save her life, who sits by the man who was once a king calls her the tiny bear.

 

* * *

 

 

She is six and ten and she spends most of the year abed, her own maester persists, so do her sisters. She rules Bear Island from a pile of furs, her advisors sits around the bed that she’s already outgrown.

 

Jon Snow comes with his sister to see how the small fleet has been keeping in the harbor. She fights the small limp still healing and keeps to their pace.

 

He finds her with the maester rubbing oils and liniments into her stiffened leg. The maester's chains sounds like rocks rolling under a wave as she sends him from the room, she pulls the furs over her naked limbs and Jon Snow sits.

 

“It still hurts?”

 

She scowls before she nods, humorless.

 

“And you are well besides?” he looks at her still small middle, at where there has been no babe. It's been some time since she was captured, she could have had a child she knows he must suppose. She waves away the guilt he seems to hold close, “We know what might happen.” Every woman who was born a Mormont knows. “Most often it’s not as bad as dying.”

           

“It breaks many women.”

 

She scoffs, “We have lived under threat and deed of it ever since the North existed. The seed of my house was sown by from the bastard sons of saltwives who sailed against their own fathers and spearwives who crossed the ice with babes under their furs, landing here before Rickard Stark and starting a house of women who fuck only bears.”

 

“Actual bears or is that just what the Ironborn call us Northerners since they can’t grow beards?”

 

She can only lift a shoulder and surmise it might be both. She smiles at the joke even though she feels naught like smiling.

 

She doesn’t tell him but suddenly then, and for many nights after, she thinks of how her sister Lyra was raped by Freys and then killed by them on the way to Greywater, of her mother laying hidden in the underbrush watching and hoping her other daughter had made it to Howland Reed.

 

Lyanna thinks of Alysane who should have taken Bear Island as her own claim, the sister who was taken for three moons by the Ironborn when she was seven and ten, her daughter half squid and her son a father she was too drunk to remember the face of..

 

Lyanna thinks of Dacey who knew only one man, a man who saved her own life at Torrhen's square, and still Dacey died during what they all thought might have been the start of peace.

 

Lyanna thinks of her mother who bore Dacey and Alysane to the same man and Lyra and Jory to another. Lyanna thinks of how she came to know of her own spawning and how her mother thought herself too old for another child the once she was fucked by a man she didn’t swear before a tree to wed.

 

She's thought before that that was why she was the daughter left behind, because she mattered the least, because she wounded her mother the most. It’s all something she thought she left behind in the cold of Winter.

 

Before he goes he tells her he is sorry for what she’s suffered, she tells him that she’s heard he killed a man when he was not older than she is right then, to prove he belonged with the wildlings, she asks him if he believes it was worth it.

 

“Yes," is his answer.

 

“That ship you allowed me to keep was worth all the things I barely remember. Honor only matters if it protects you.”

           

“It doesn’t protect you.” He says, sure. Understanding.

 

She thinks of Sansa Stark who wed a wilding before the old gods and named her house Redstark, who suffered more than Danny Flint ever did in that awful song about the Night’s Watch and the Wall and a girl’s pain. “It's worth nothing. Your sister understood that when I was only a child, I would tell her now if it brought her some peace that she has survived worse than men who die during battle do. By now I doubt it would matter.”

 

“You both survived.”

 

“Aye, we did.”

 

She flushes, she is proud. _Mostly_ , she is proud, but he grins and he is the most beautiful man she thinks she has seen, like the sea that kills or like a dragon falling as it sets everything to fire.

 

His grin is like dragonglass; sharp and black.

 

* * *

 

 

She is three and ten when her King’s mount falls from the sky and onto the isle, an old woman in a older croft sees and wakes the Lady of Bear island who has been on her way to the keep that she has only started to think would be better if made of stone.

 

Lyanna Mormont hacks at the hide of the dying beast, it’s heat burns her arms but she would die for a man who might be able to survive the heat anyway if the tales being told about him are true, She suffers the heat and cuts away dragon hide and soft pink-red-grey flesh that is supposed to be able to bend steel.

 

It is like slaughtering a sheep only larger and she wonders what the meat will taste like, she won’t waste the spoils of her kill on something as thin as honor bestowed on fantastic beasts not believed to be real.

 

“Can you feel your leg?” She asks the man she calls King. He nods.

 

She calls again, loudly for more men, to help her at her effort.

 

“I expect that you send will send men to repair my gatehouse when all this is over.”

 

"I'll come myself," he laughs, and his eyes shine bright with pain and grief for the borrowed beast that must die because it can no longer rise. A dragon who has been born and is now dying, a creature of legends and old songs being slaughtered like pig feed, she finds it as awful a song as any of the others.

 

She thinks it understands why she is doing what she must with her too small axe, that it accepts the pain with only the smallest of struggles, still, it must die, she pledged her house to the King in the North and they can’t have another crippled Stark.

 

* * *

 

 

She is three and ten for a few days longer and has gone to chastise a maid who has forgotten to bring up water for the tub. She finds the maid and she finds Jon Snow who some call hero and others call king, who she has seen fall from the sky, who has abdicated his claim now that the dead are all burned, with his head under a woman’s skirts in the emptied kitchens.

 

“When the bastard of Winterfell has finished whatever business he attends to my maid still has other duties to perform.”

 

He knocks over a bucket of hearth ashes and curses. His mouth shines and her maid is ruddy cheeked, breathing like a rode horse.

 

She only tuts, not entirely unaware of what Kings, former ones too, find to do with maids in empty rooms. “My maester will ask how you reopened your wounds after only a day freed from a sick bed.”

 

She does not wait for replies, she only repeats the expectation that her bath will be readied, her maid pulls her skirts back into order and finds her way around the kneeling former King of the North.

 

* * *

 

 

She is nine and ten and she almost loses her eye to an arrow, again, it bloodies her brow and she curses, softly, she curses the archer and his mother and his sisters and next to her Jon Snow only says, “Let’s go kill them.”

 

“At your command, your grace.”

 

And he smirks back towards her.

 

She allows him to go forward first. There are more reavers, come with climbing hooks in the night, she’s made sure the castle quiets after shore battles but stays readied through the night, waiting, the Ironborn remain predictable in the absence of true leadership.

 

The raid is ended when Jon Snow takes a rock from the pile she has seen cleaned and scoured and uses it to fit the final reaver’s helmet tighter to his head, his face disappears under the crumpled metal, blood seeps from the ruin of the man’s head like the juice from a peach squeezed in hand. He had looked up to her before he’d finished, and she had nodded, acquiesced to his particular need for whatever he hopes to find in the gore.

 

She wants to have the bodies strung across the shoreline but knows it would only mean more raids and a reprisal of the whole bloody night, she has them burned again.

 

A better choice she’s sure even as it remains the least satisfactory.

 

Her brow still bleeds.

 

The maester puts honey on her fresh-sewn and swollen brow, Jon Snow hums the Bear and Maiden Fair hoarsely from where he dresses a burn from hot pitch himself.

 

* * *

 

 

Her name-day passes and he has yet to leave the keep. His face has lost its gauntness, he looks strong again, a warrior and not a wanderer.

 

They break their fast together with her advisors and her sister Jory’s quickly growing son, he has green frog eyes and crooked teeth but he is fast and already bringing down deer with the bow.

 

Jon Snow has promised to ring his head like a bell when the boy is ready for sword and shield.

 

She tells him storm season with close the island for two moons until the harvest season starts, he abides only his own moods and mind.

 

* * *

 

Storm season strands him to the island and while other make ready the keep he settles above her like a wolf with lesser prey. She is still the Lady of Bear Island even if she’s let the Bastard of Winterfell pull her breeches to her boots, even if she pressed her small palm to the placket of his own and held the weight of his cock against her palm.

 

It’s the best way she’s found to make her intentions most clear.

 

“I’m not going to put a babe in you.”

 

“I’m not asking for a babe, I’m holding your cock, you’re going to put it in me.”

 

“You talk a lot.”

 

“You grin too much, I liked you better before when you were still surly.”

 

“ _You_ were surly.”

 

“I was a child.”

 

He stills, “Not now.”

 

She bares teeth, “Now I have teats. But, not much else has changed.”

 

He looks down to where she’s unlaced him and pulled him free, heavy, insistent, hot in her hand. His fingers are sticky on her wrist from their meal, his mouth is sweet on hers, “Everything changed. It’s Summer.” His voice says the word like it’s something of wonder. His hands are still sticky when they press open her thighs, there’s honey on the sharp edges of her jaw, his lips, and then the taste of her is there too.

 

She’s had men before; Northerner’s who don’t quite expect her fast hands even though they’ve perhaps wished more woman had them, a wilding who barely cared that she was a great lady of a noble house so long as she could bury an axe in someone’s skull, blood and brains on her hands and under her nails. She’s even had a frog boy who put his hand down her breeches and grinned like something that knew great secrets and old ways, she can understand why Jory stayed in Greywater.

 

But what she does now is not the same as the rest, Jon Snow is a bastard who used to be King, old enough to have seen a man die before she’d been born, he’s ridden and fallen from a dragon, he’s been dead and then alive again, she’s fought for him and he’s come to her keep and fought there with her.She’s never needed anyone to fight _for_ her but she knows he would do that too, and it makes her wonder if she’s expected this.

 

It feels like expectation after all.

 

He’s come to her keep and now he’s between her thighs before they’ve finished breaking their fast in what he would call her solar but what she calls by no particular name and most everyone else has gone to weather out the storm that's come.

 

He's pushed her back towards her chambers through the open door to her unmade bed, there is no fire in the hearth but there is only warmth now. He has yet to help her with her boots or her breeches and his cock weeps against her naked hip.

 

“I’m going to put that in my mouth and then stop before you peak,” she scowls, his mouth had been between her thighs before he decided he wanted to be in her bed instead of on the covered floor where breakfast still waits, half-finished.

 

Sh's pushed to her bed and then he's turning her to her belly and throwing her knees up onto the bed, grumbles about how he wasn’t finished and nips at her arse, hard. His tongue rolls over where he’s made her slick, licking into her and she might understand why her maids used to slattern themselves for him.

 

There’s nothing like a song to be sung about the sloppy heat of his mouth, he’s only a man and that’s all he needs to be to make her bite at the bedclothes, to make her search for purchase with her boots and press up like a bitch to a bigger wolf.

 

She’s broken like a wave, turned to her side with her knees held together tight while the coolness of his absence strokes at the heat of her sex like a dead man’s touch, he is touching her she realizes as she comes awares.

 

His thumb between her folds seeks out where she’s been wont to touch herself some nights, lonely or desperately bored, too long from a fight or a bedmate. He only touches enough to make her hips pull towards his hand and then he’s reaching to yank off her boots and breeches and press her back to her side when she tries to swing her legs around him. he doesn't let her pull him close with strong, young thighs as other men might.

 

He seems to like nudging her back down when she tries to get hands and elbows under her weight to raise herself. He presses the heavy head of himself against the folds of her sex and she lets her head rest, on the bed, reluctant but willing to let him has her as he likes.

 

“You look like your pouting.”

 

“Because you move so slowly.”

 

He face lights, amused and he pushes inside, with her legs held together it’s a snug fit. When his hand lifts her to knee, all her toes curl, both hands twist the coverlet to disarray. Her huffing breath seems stuck, she’s full of him soon and he's still standing but with eyes closed, liking the feel of her. “You’re usually on top I’d guess.”

 

“You talk too much,” she complains, words are better for before or after the act, she hardly wants words over him stroking inside of her.

 

He pulls from her only to slide himself inside after a long moment, like the tide, like a breath and she hardly has words of her own, or sounds to make because of it. The soft clap of his sharp hips against her bottom, and the slicks sounds of him moving deeper then retreating, bring to mind something like battle, like being wounded and remaining alive.

 

He only stops to command her in soft tone to open her tunic, she stretches her arms high and twists with it until it is all the way off and she’s naked as babe on the bearskin of her bed.

 

He expects and she gives and there’s a sweetness in the act that she could never have herself alone.

 

He fills her with his seed and the hot spill of it only makes her want him a second time.

 

Jon Snow proves a poor wrestler. She surmounts him then strips him then fills his hands with her breasts. She licks into his mouth which tastes of her and rubs her throat across his beard until it’s as pink as the tender flesh between her thighs.

 

He spills again between her thighs after long, she bites at his scars and calls him King.

 

* * *

 

 

She is a woman of twenty years and the only summer she remembers has only just started. She says, “I don’t know what there is to do without an enemy to kill, what are we to do?”

 

He answers, “We could find some dragon eggs, turn the world on its head.”

 

“I was unimpressed, a bolt to the eye and you got brought right down under it.”

           

“Daenerys saved the North.”

 

“Aye, she killed the final King of Winter, the other three were already dead, you and your fat maester friend killed two. Reed’s daughter another, in a cave while carrying your crippled brother. Very fierce dead men. The last Targaryen needed a dragon to do what a bastard, a maester, and a girl who easts frogs did with an old man’s sword and some forgotten dragonglass.”

 

“She was _brave_.”

 

“She’s _dead_ ," it's not that she means to mock him, only speak to him the truth when no one else would, "the dragons are dead, the dead are dead. Saying she saved the North is like saying Summer will last forever.”

           

He’s full of mirth, “A lie?”

 

“Too soon to tell.”

 

And she thinks, ‘Here I stand, Winter is over.’

 

Until his last day. He is meant for songs, she thinks. But not until he's dead. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The main idea of Jon and Lyanna's relationship/friendship in this is based on the idea that she found (and kept) a cache of Stannis' loan from the iron bank that she found on a ship of Stannis' that got stuck in the ice, and then used it to save the north from starving in the winter when they fought the white walkers, Jon then takes the blame for this and the implication is meant to be that he relinquishes his titles for the sake of stability i.e. he is always going to be Jon Snow instead of Targaryen or Stark. Also I guess you could say that's why he says, "I won't give you a babe from this" before they does the do, is also some kind of sire no heirs theme. But that's just my fic-canon for this while I was writing. 
> 
> Other notes in no particular order:
> 
> The Wain, or the wagon/cart/etc. is part of/is Ursa major (or minor, whatever), wiki trolling tells me sailors did use it in mythological accounts of sailors navigating
> 
> House Words for House Mormont are 'Here We Stand'.
> 
> Honey is used even today for wounds, it helps with pain via maintaining moisture balance of the skin while also dehydrating bacteria and its sugar content overkills bacteria which readily take it in. Science.
> 
> Dany Flint is a canonical song that is about a girl who joins the night’s watch by pretending to be a boy and is raped and killed by brothers of the night’s watch.
> 
> House Mormont’s history is not discussed in the book beyond that the women of the island have always had to fend off raiders and wildings, no fathers are named for any of Maege’s daughters or grandchildren, there are no marriages mentioned either.
> 
> The fates of the Mormont women in this are all noncanon at the moment but who knows what the next book will bring.
> 
> House Woodfoot did have Bear Island but they were destroyed by the Ironborn who held it until the Starks won it in a wrestling contest and gave it to the Mormonts.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Good Lived Yesterday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7526323) by [grayglube](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube)
  * [blue lips](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9351815) by [Errantmushroom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Errantmushroom/pseuds/Errantmushroom)




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